A museum of our own

Does Madison’s history need its own space?

by

In the late winter of 1973, Judy Greenspan ran for the Madison school board and narrowly lost in the primary. That would be less than a footnote in Madison history if it were not for the fact that Greenspan was the first openly gay woman to run for public office in the United States.

“Early activists were presenting their own lives as a way to break down ignorance,” explains historian Dick Wagner. Greenspan was part of a group of openly gay people who appeared on panel discussions around town. But when they were invited by students to appear at West High School, the principal cancelled it. So, Greenspan ran for the school board.

You will hear more about Greenspan in coming years as Wagner’s second volume on gay history in Wisconsin, Coming Out and Pushing Forward, is scheduled for publication next June. His first volume, We’ve Been Here All Along, has just been released. It covers the period up to the Stonewall uprising in 1969.

Wagner, a former politician himself who served on the Dane County board in the ’80s and ’90s and ran for county executive, is pursuing his passion for history in his retirement from a career as a state policy analyst. But if it weren’t for the happenstance of Wagner’s abilities as a historian and writer, and his interest in the topic, the chances that Greenspan’s story would be told seem slim.

Like many communities of Madison’s size the city does not have a museum dedicated to its own history. Larger communities like New York and Chicago have the resources to support world-class museums focusing on local histories, and many smaller communities have volunteer historical societies that can afford to occupy a relatively inexpensive formerly vacant old building and fill it with antiques. But historic preservation advocates in midsize communities like Madison are up against high real estate costs and are also faced with a philanthropic community that might have other more pressing priorities and interests.

Noted UW historian William Cronon compares Madison to Washington, D.C. “Although it is a capital city with dozens of museums — surely more than any other city in the U.S. — not one of them is devoted solely to the history of the city itself,” Cronon says.

Like Washington, Madison is a company town. “Why don’t we have [a museum]?” asks retired UW Madison Dean of Students Mary Rouse as she laments that even her little hometown of Gouverneur, New York (population 3,949), has one. “My guess is the two 500-hundred-pound public gorillas we already have here, namely UW-Madison and the state government.”

Milwaukee-based historian John Gurda agrees and he adds a third gorilla. “I suspect that a major reason Madison doesn’t have its own museum is that it’s the home of the Wisconsin Historical Society, which has a world-class research collection and a good museum. Because Madison is the capital of the state, its story is to some degree subsumed into the Wisconsin story.”

Gurda adds a less tangible reason. “[Another] factor is the built-in transience of those institutions. Every graduating class, every change in administration creates significant turnover in the population; continuity suffers as a result. It’s hard to take much interest in a city’s story if you know you’re going to be gone in a few years.”

Madison is often a brief stop on a person’s life journey. But there is such a thing as a native Madisonian (you can tell one by their inability to give directions that include street names) and there are also plenty of us who came here, found ourselves smitten and decided to stay for the duration.

One of the permanent transplants is Stuart Levitan. Another recovering politician who retired from his day job as a state labor arbitrator in 2015, Levitan came to Madison from Long Island, New York, in 1979.  He has since written two volumes of Madison history, Madison: The Illustrated Sesquicentennial History, Vol. 1 and Madison in the Sixties. While he was able to get what he needed from the Wisconsin Historical Society and other sources, he sees value in a Madison museum.

“By combining artifacts, documents and oral histories, a Madison historical museum would be valuable for historians conducting research, Madisonians who want to connect to their past, and tourists curious about how and why Madison became so special,” says Levitan.

David Maraniss agrees. Maraniss, who grew up in Madison and spends summers here, is a bestselling author of biographies of people like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, but he has also written Wisconsin-based books like a biography of Vince Lombardi and a history of the Vietnam War, told in the parallel stories of a combat unit in Vietnam and anti-war protestors in Madison. His most recent book, A Good American Family, tells the story of his own family and his father, Elliott, who was targeted in the Red Scare of the 1950s but found work at The Capital Times.

“I don’t think there can ever be too many history museums, libraries and archives,” says Maraniss, noting that the state Historical Society and the UW Library have been important resources for his books. “I see two more possibilities that would be great. One, a history museum that captures this city in its totality beyond the university. And two, a concerted effort by the Madison Public Library to develop and maintain its own archive and oral history section that would have papers and histories of the politics, geography, sociology, and vibrant history of this amazing city. Probably these two ideas can be merged into one.”

“I greatly appreciate David’s enthusiasm,” says Madison Public Library Director Gregory Mickells, who points out that the Central Library does have a local history room and a staff member assigned to it, though that position is currently vacant.

“I think it would be wonderful to be able to collect, house and preserve the story of Madison,” adds Mickells. “I could see a natural progression of collecting oral histories and even being able to effectively archive the many community conversations we are having now as part of planning for libraries and services. And I see tremendous value in creating a museum dedicated to Madison’s history.” 

Muriel Simms, a Madison native and educator who edited Settlin’: Stories of Madison’s Early African American Families, says that a city museum could acknowledge communities that have traditionally been marginalized, including African Americans, Hmong and Latinos, as well as women and LGBTQ people, and the role they played in shaping the city. That would require careful planning and the involvement of many people.

“Underrepresented communities have to be represented,” she says. “And language has to be worded in a way that will make it clear to the wider community what the history was. It will require a lot of work.”

So, in our amazing city with its vibrant history why hasn’t this happened yet? One issue is money.

“The challenges are great to sustain this type of activity,” says Mickells. “It is not just the logistics of housing and maintaining the collections but the staffing and the continuous process of keeping the collection relevant and accessible.”  

“This [museum] has been a dream of mine forever,” says Ann Waidelich, who was president of the volunteer group Historic Madison in the 1990s and is still active in the historic preservation movement. She says that Historic Madison made a strategic decision when it was founded in 1973 not to pursue a museum, but instead to publish a journal, which it still does, but on an irregular basis.

While she sees tremendous value in a museum she wonders where the money would come from to build and staff it with professional curators. She has been working with Historic Blooming Grove and the Dean House because, “I wanted to know what it was like to own a building in addition to collecting history.”

She reports that “the building sucks up all the money and energy, drains volunteers, and seems to leave little time for collecting or studying history.”

She says that people in Madison historic preservation circles often talk about a museum when they get together, but that the idea of raising millions of dollars and finding real estate in expensive downtown Madison where most agree such a facility would belong is, “just overwhelming.”

Still, she believes that if the right people in the philanthropic community got excited by the idea it could happen. She points to the Children’s Museum. “They started out in the basement of a building on University Avenue.” Today, the museum is in a lovely remodeled building just off the Square with an annual budget of around $3 million.

One long underrepresented group in local history, the Ho-Chunk Nation, is developing a museum and cultural center at the tribe’s casino property. “There is a willingness to turn back and re-examine our history and tell these important stories,” says Executive Manager Dan Brown, who is heading up the project. “Think Auschwitz and Berlin in their [memorializing] of the Holocaust so that no such atrocity ever occurs again.”  

But for other histories of Madison, time is running out. Don Sanford has written Our Fourth Lake: A Social History of Lake Mendota. He too sees value in a local museum and he fears that raw material is being lost all the time. “Without a doubt,” says Sanford. “Many folks I met who had artifacts knew little about the Dane County Historical Society and thought that the Wisconsin Historical Society was not a repository for things that were strictly Madison-related. And because of that, many things have been lost.”

While Wagner praises the Wisconsin Historical Society for their work he notes that until recently, gay history was largely ignored. “Gay history has been preserved mostly by community activists, not by professionals,” he says. Some of those collections will be preserved and some will end up in the landfill. Wagner is encouraged that the UW has recently established a community-based archives committee that has preserved 80 or so oral histories from early gay activists and is now reaching out to other communities. But he adds, “If we had a real city history museum, who knows what else would be saved?”

Well, so what should be saved? If the money could be found to build and staff a Madison history museum what would it contain? That would, no doubt, prompt a fair amount of impassioned community discussion, perhaps generations of it, before a brick was laid.

Gurda offers some basics. “Madison’s early years interest me most. It came into existence as a geographic compromise between the lead region of the southwest and the port cities of the southeast, with a liberal boost from the very self-interested James Duane Doty. The story of the Capitol [buildings] is also compelling, as is the saga of the university’s remarkable growth. The city’s resistance to manufacturing made a huge difference in its development, particularly in contrast to Milwaukee. I’d also tell the story of Madison’s neighborhoods, including those that exist only in memory.”

“I would emphasize that it is an intentional community,” says Wagner. “From Doty’s plan forward through Nolen. How intellect and public processes can shape a place. I would emphasize the big plans like the 1970 Dane County Land Use Plan. [And I] would feature Madison as a successful community and the institutions that build success like the Park and Pleasure Drive [Association], Downtown Madison and others.”

“I want to see local voice in our city preserved, especially those of immigrants and people of color,” says Rouse. “And let me add to the mix younger voices, including youth at all school levels. Stories from teachers and their impact upon their students also need to be heard. And, how about private individuals and businesses, which have blessed us with their generosity, [like] Bob and Irwin Goodman? And, let’s not forget the faith-based organizations, the synagogues, the churches and the mosques who have provided interfaith opportunities to strengthen our community.”

Simms hopes a city museum can avoid the great man theory of history by recognizing everyday people and communities. “In publications that I read, it seems that authors want to highlight firsts,” she says. “That gets problematic, naming people, certain people as important and leaving others out. I would hope that people who author texts or put together a museum, would look at deeds. What has an organization done to impact a community?”

She gives one example of something she sees worthy of documenting in a museum, the NAACP protests, held across the country, against screening of the racist film, The Birth of a Nation, in 1915. “Listing deeds helps people understand the impact. People don’t do things by themselves,” she says. “People working together make accomplishments happen.”

Levitan offers a breathless list of artifacts he would include: representation of Ho-Chunk settlement and a Black Hawk War item; copy of Doty plat; Civil War recruitment poster; Confederate Rest cenotaph (no controversy there); William Noland’s drum major outfit; Fauerbach brewery item; book from Silas Pinney’s personal library (founder of Madison free library); early mule team transit car; something from Woman’s Club Annual Report; Madison Park and Pleasure Drive Association First Edition or illustrations from Madison: A Model City; Henry Barnbock’s thesis, “Housing Conditions of the Italian Community in Madison Wisconsin;” items from the old Greenbush neighborhood, including pieces from the Italian Workmen’s Club, St. Joseph’s church and school, Agudas Achim synagogue, Neighborhood House and Longfellow School; membership card in Bow-Tie Club (KKK membership, necessary to get hired by police department circa 1924) or Klan hood; something from Oscar Mayer and other items representing industrial east side; items from Edgewater Hotel and Manchester’s department store; Frank Lloyd Wright’s renderings for various iterations of Monona Terrace; pro/anti Monona Terrace referendum lit (1962); Monona Basin Plan (1967) scale model; Wright’s Nakoma Country Club plan; something from Hill’s grocery store; the first papers published by The Capital Times and Madison Press Connection; cut ribbon from the Parade of Homes dedication program; Gay Braxton Apartments’ (1965) dedication program; Madison Central Library dedication program (1965);  demonstration placard from Sen. Ted Kennedy’s campus appearance (1966) when he was heckled by anti-war protesters; sheepskin jacket Soglin was wearing at Dow demonstration; copy of Connections (the first underground paper in the state); Otis Redding poster or wreckage from his plane; poster and tear-gas canister from Mifflin Block Party riot; the final Central High School yearbook; damaged engine block from Army Math Research Center (Sterling Hall) bombers’ van; opening night programs for the old Civic Center and Overture; a pink flamingo; assortment of mayoral campaign literature; musical memorabilia from Ben Sidran, Butch Vig, Clyde Stubblefield; entertainment memorabilia from Thornton Wilder, Dan Travanti, Chris Farley; political posters and correspondence. 

What did he leave out? Send all correspondence to Stu Levitan.

“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner. “It’s not even past.”

History is not a fixed narrative, an unchanging truth. All history is contested. The fight is over which stories to tell and whose stories to tell and from what perspective. Who gets to be the subject of the story and who gets to be the all-powerful storyteller?

Facts, dates, documents and artifacts don’t change. But which ones to emphasize and how to explain them and in what context to place them does change. Sometimes it changes with the discovery of new documents, but more often it changes as we become more aware and more sensitive to stories of people who have been left out of or given short shrift in traditional historical narratives.

For a long time the history of any American place was thought of in popular culture and even in much of academia as the history of Europeans who came here. The attention given to Native Americans was usually little more than a token introductory chapter. Other people of color and most of the experiences of women were barely mentioned. Gay people were not mentioned at all.

It is true that these mostly white, mostly male actors were important historical figures who deserve to have their stories told. You cannot tell the story of Madison without James Doty and Frank Lloyd Wright and, for that matter, Paul Soglin. It would be just as wrong to portray a history of Madison without white men as it has been to write that history without anyone else. What’s needed is a more complete picture.

A Madison history museum could be a catalyst to preserve documents, artifacts and oral histories, of little interest to other museums, which might otherwise be lost. That behind- the-scenes work would be of great value to future historians. But the front of the house cannot be just a collection of old stuff, but a carefully curated — and no doubt hotly argued about — set of stories, which taken as a whole, explain to ourselves and to anybody else who might be interested, who we are as Madisonians, how we got to be this way and who we might become in the future.

Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway seems intrigued. “Madison has a very unique identity but does not effectively celebrate it,” she says. “Madison could use a museum that celebrates that which is distinct and separate about this great city.

“Few cities in America are so well known for their combination of intellect and activism,” she adds. “Fewer still are known for developing soundtracks for that activism played by Clyde Stubblefield, Steve Miller, Tracy Nelson, Ben Sidran and Garbage. And no city is so physically beautiful and so very good at encouraging people of all backgrounds to embrace that beauty and make their home here.”

“What’s the value of historical understanding?” asks Wagner before supplying an answer. “If you think about the incredible things we’ve done in this state and this city, and you don’t have any understanding of how they happened, then you take them for granted.”

Let’s not allow ourselves to forget Judy Greenspan.